Is it just me, or should we be way more horrified by the fact that the US dropped atomic bombs on civilians? It would be like Russia dropping two bombs in Kyiv today, which is unthinkable, but it feels the US bombing of Japan is kind of shrugged off.
Obviously looking at it from today's perspective it's (hopefully) unthinkable, but there is a lot written from contemporary sources which make a fairly persuasive argument.
The main concerns were that the Japanese government was simply not in a place where it could surrender, which meant a ground invasion of the Japanese mainland was seen as mandatory. Given the prior experiences of how dedicated Japanese defenders could be (eg Mount Suribachi), it was assumed that any actual attempt to take the Japanese mainland would result in untold deaths, to the point where the US has enough Purple Heart medals created (in anticipation of the casualties am invasion would involve) that they didn't have to restart production until 2008. As horrifying as it is, the first atomic bomb was considered the lesser evil. That said, Nagasaki is much much harder to defend.
Unrelated, but I recommend everyone who can to visit Hiroshima and visit the museums there. Hopefully it will instill in everyone a fervent desire to never again see such horrific things enacted again.
> Unrelated, but I recommend everyone who can to visit Hiroshima and visit the museums there. Hopefully it will instill in everyone a fervent desire to never again see such horrific things enacted again.
The Nagasaki muesum is very good, too. And it's a nicer town to visit today. (We were just there last month.)
> That said, Nagasaki is much much harder to defend.
The first bomb was dropped August 6.
The Japanese War Cabinet met on August 9 to discuss the situation, and concluded that the US didn't have the resources for more, so they concluded to not surrender. Even after the first bomb was dropped.
In the middle of the meeting they learned of the second bomb which was dropped that morning.
After the second bomb the War Cabinet was split 3-3. They called in the full cabinet and that was split as well.
Two bombs weren't enough to decisively convince them to surrender, and so the Emperor had to be called in to break the deadlock.
And yet we are to believe that even though two bombs were barely enough to force a surrender, zero bombs would have sufficed?
Japan's decision to surrender was most likely due to the fact that the Soviet Union invaded Manchuria with 1.5 million men.[1] Yes, the atomic bombings were horrible, but the fire bombing of Tokyo wasn't much better. The Japanese regime didn't care that much. When the Soviets declared war that was the breaking point and their situation became hopeless. This point is very often overlooked by US based media and historians (I guess for obvious reasons), but the fact of the matter is that we don't know if only the two bombs would've been enough to make Japan capitulate.
> This point is very often overlooked by US based media and historians (I guess for obvious reasons), but the fact of the matter is that we don't know if only the two bombs would've been enough to make Japan capitulate.
This is covered by Walker in his book Prompt and Utter Destruction:
And he still concludes that dropping the bombs was a necessary element in their surrender.
The Japanese were expecting the Russians/Soviets to enter the war: the only surprise was that it was sooner than they expected (Spring 1946). Fighting them was already taken into account in their 'calculations'.
From a 1946 article:
> About a week after V-J Day, I was one of a small group of scientists and engineers interrogating an intelligent, well-informed Japanese Army officer in Yokohama. We asked him what, in his opinion, would have been the next major move if the war had continued. He replied: "You would probably have tried to invade our homeland with a landing operation on Kyushu about November 1. I think the attack would have been made on such and such beaches."
> "Could you have repelled this landing?" we asked, and he answered: "It would have been a very desperate fight, but I do not think we could have stopped you."
> "What would have happened then?" we asked.
> He replied: "We would have kept on fighting until all Japanese were killed, but we would not have been defeated," by which he meant that they would not have been disgraced by surrender.
I'd be willing to bet that the Japanese would have been willing to pull out of Manchuria, lose that territory, and use those troops for home island defence.
> I'd be willing to bet that the Japanese would have been willing to pull out of Manchuria
Given the success of Soviet's new combined arm doctrine (later called “deep battle”), I don't think “pull out of Manchuria” would have been a possibility, as the Japanese force there would very likely have collapsed to a point where getting back to Japan would have been impossible (think Dunkirk but with much more land to leave behind you and with an enemy moving even faster and where you don't have neither air or sea superiority).
Japan was in talks with the soviets for a couple of months, thinking that they were somewhat neutral and intermediating with the USA a negotiated peace. On the 9th they learned the hard way that it was a ploy while they massed troops, and their situation was now a full invasion of the USA with nukes and the Soviets, with zero allies or even neutrals to lean on
How Japan made the decision to surrender is well covered in the book "Japan's Longest Day", originally published in 1973. Many of the major players were interviewed. There's a reasonably accurate movie version worth watching, if you're interested in this.
It's a very strange story of decision-making under extreme pressure. No one was in charge. The Navy was barely talking to the Army. The civilian government had been sidelined from control of military matters years before. The Emperor was supposed to be a figurehead. And, as pointed out above, there was an attempted coup to stop the surrender.
So killing civilians en masse is fine, as long it forces the enemy to surrender with (probably) fewer casualties? Why even have laws of war then, if we adjust adjudicate these questions with a utilitarian calculus?
> So killing civilians en masse is fine, as long it forces the enemy to surrender with (probably) fewer casualties
Of course not. Startegic calculations for warfare should not be conflated with a moral justifications for military actions. We have to come to terms with the fact that it was a morally unjustifiable decision, regardless of the effects it had on the war. This is something that too many people forget today.
> Why even have laws of war then
I think laws of war (the ones that work) are only an attempt to change the incentives that are presented to the belligerents during warfare, in such a way that the confilct is less damaging. They are not much about making the belligerents more morally virtuous in any sense other than a consequentialist / utlitarian one.
They didn't by our standards. A lot of what we think of as the laws of war today were clarified after WWII. Bombing civilians was illegal, but not in retaliation; so the US could bomb Hiroshima because the Axis had bombed Coventry. The fact that that was the Germans and probably an accident didn't matter.
If this seems extremely sketchy that's because it was, but so was Nuremberg. The Holocaust wasn't illegal for the Nazis to do to their own population - the prosecutors at the trials had to make up a standard of "behavior that shocks the conscience" that previously didn't exist in international law.
None of this reflects on morality, only legality, of course. But the legalities then were pretty primitive.
What makes you say, that the bombing of Coventry was "probably an accident"? There was repeated, and clearly well planned out bombing of the city between 1940-1942 [1].
It was not a remark intended to excuse the Germans. There is some evidence, which I am admittedly struggling to find a citation for at the moment, that the early 1940 raids were generally intended to hit military targets and the Germans just weren't good enough at bombing to be that discriminate.
Later on of course both sides were hitting civilian targets deliberately, and using incendiaries and high explosives. But it's possible the British were the first to do it deliberately, in retaliation for the Germans doing it accidentally (which they naturally did not believe).
Another factor in the surrender was the Japanese had intelligence that a third bomb was to be dropped on Tokyo. (That intelligence later turned out to be false.)
One bomb could have been all that America had. Two bombs meant more were coming.
You're just missing an entire half of the story here: which is the USSR attacking on the 9th of August!
Of course if you omit the second most important factor then things start becoming obvious, but in reality the answer to this question is far from obvious (in neither direction, needless to say, the tankies who claim with certainty that the bombing was not needed are equally wrong)
> The Japanese War Cabinet met on August 9 to discuss the situation, and concluded that the US didn't have the resources for more
does that sound believable to you? The Japanese somehow had intel on a secret new weapon? And confident about it to the point they are willing to bet their entire country on it, in a war that's already ending?
> The Japanese somehow had intel on a secret new weapon
Yes. They did. The Mexico branch of the Japanese espionage service knew about the Trinity test in advance and sent agents to collect fallout to analyze. They already knew before Hiroshima that we had a working atomic bomb. They underestimated our isotope separation production capacity because their own U-235 isotope separation plant was behind schedule. There have been books written about the Japanese atomic bomb project. The day after Hiroshima, the Japanese government announced "We also have atomic bombs and we will use them against the invasion forces." They were expecting the war to last another year. The head of the Japanese atomic bomb project said that his military boss expected the war to last another year.
Japan didn't know until August 9 that the US was able to build plutonium bombs.
Edit since I can't reply: The difference is meaningful when you're deciding whether to surrender. If you know that the US doesn't have enough refined uranium for another uranium bomb, and you have no evidence that the US can build plutonium bombs, then you have grounds to believe the bombing of Hiroshima was not repeatable.
> If you know that the US doesn't have enough refined uranium for another uranium bomb […]
There was no way for the Japanese to know what the US was capable of. It was wishful thinking with zero evidence on the part of the Japanese leadership.
So did the Germans, but it's not because the biggest industrial power on earth (in both demography and industrial output), with its capacities fully intact because the war never took place there, that smaller countries diminished after years of blockade and critical infrastructure bombing can do it too…
If the Japanese projected their own capacity on the US, they were ripe for a bad surprise.
The unstated assumption in this is that it was important for the US to be the one to defeat Japan. It was not just about defeating Japan, it was also about the Soviet Union not defeating it first.
The US had been continously fire bombing Japan at the point the atomic bombs dropped. In the grand scheme of things the bombs were just very large blips in waves upon waves of destruction.
Japan would have been defeated without a US ground invasion and without the atomic bombs. But it would have been defeated by the Soviet Union, not the US.
There were three possible outcomes:
* an unconditional surrender to the Soviet Union, possibly following the death or arrest of the Emperor
* a conditional surrender to the US granting immunity to the Emperor
* an unconditional last-ditch surrender to the US to prevent a Soviet advance and further loss of territory
The atomic bombs played a very small part in this. As has been stated repeatedly in attempts to justify their use: the Japanese were "dedicated" to defend the mainland and the Emperor to the point of performing suicide attacks. The deaths from the atomic bombings meant very little relative to the civilian lives that had already been lost to the fire bombings before, after and throughout. But in consequence this meant that the integrity of the mainland territory and the life of the Emperor meant a lot - and this was threatened by the prospect of an invasion, not further atomic bombings.
The sad irony is that the demand of the surrender being unconditional was ultimately more about narrative-building and optics as the US effectively gave Japan what it wanted by leaving the Emperor untouched and not making any territorial changes. It's clear to see why the US demanded it but the outcome effectively met most of the terms a conditional surrender would have set prior to the atomic bombings.
In consequence the atomic bombs provided very little strategic benefits and only meant the US would have to go on with those attacks on its conscience - not that it seemed to weigh too heavily.
It is a bit surprising that so much damage was inflicted on civilians with firebombing and all for the sake of what looks like vindictiveness. Surely after the victory it would have been possible to write the books, stating it was « unconditional surrender » regardless of what kind of surrender it actually was (it is victors who tend to be able to write history books as they see fit.)
The Japanese populace, whether they wanted to or not, was fully prepared and planning to defend the home islands with their lives as gruesomely as possible.
If America had not dropped the bombs and the Soviets ended up finishing off Japan like so many seem to think they would, the Soviets at the end of the war were NOT known for being gentle in their dominance.
There was no ending to Japan in WWII that did not kill hundreds of thousands of civilians.
Strategic bombing were attempted multiple time during the war (first by the Germans on UK, and the UK/US on Germany then Japan) without success (and in most cases it actually strengthened the resolve)
In the documentary The Fog of War, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara recalls General Curtis LeMay, who relayed the Presidential order to drop nuclear bombs on Japan, said:
"If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?
Selden mentions another critique of the nuclear bombing, which he says the U.S. government effectively suppressed for twenty-five years, as worth mention. On 11 August 1945, the Japanese government filed an official protest over the atomic bombing to the U.S. State Department through the Swiss Legation in Tokyo
Truth is most people here are hypocrites, might makes right and the end justifies the means, but only for our side! Mind you, I'm no arguing that these obvious truths are wrong, but intellectual honesty shouldn't go to the trash in favour of wishful thinking and posturing.
We should be as exactly horrified as we are by the fact the US dropped convential high explosives and incendaries on civilians.
The firebombing of Tokyo had similar death and injury stats to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and there were another 72 cities in Japan completely destroyed by bombing prior to the atomic weapons being rushed into use before the war ended.
Cities in Europe were also bombed, and later more tonnage was dropped by the US in SE Asia than they dropped in WWII .. many of those mines dropped remain to this day, still killing and maiming children.
> We should be as exactly horrified as we are by the fact the US dropped convential high explosives and incendaries on civilians.
Not exactly. Having firebombs at our disposal does not require the head of one country to have unaccountable power over the lives of everyone on earth. Firebombs do not require entire industries shrouded in secrecy, nor the transformation of security clearance, or lack there of, into a weapon for shutting down public inquiry and challenges, nor the creation of parallel government structure both invisible and unaccountable to the public.
The effects on the cities may not be that different, but nuke's unmitigated corruption of the democratic system is certainly horrifying.
> We should be as exactly horrified as we are by the fact the US dropped convential high explosives and incendaries on civilians.
And we should be exactly as horrified for what the Japanese did to mainland China. Or the fact that they allied themselves with one of the greatest genocides in history. We should be exactly as horrified at what the alternative was, which was hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of casualties that would have been caused by a conventional invasion just to get that country to stop doing what it was doing.
> should we be way more horrified by the fact that the US dropped atomic bombs on civilians?
Not really.
Strategic bombing, as a concept, was about killing civilians. The idea that you should try not to kill civilians in war was still an evolving concept around WWII, in part because precision munitions and industrial warmaking were in their infancy and toddlerhood, respectively.
It was also a response to the horrors of world war 1, where armies faced each other in open fields and the conflict dragged on for years without lines changing much. The reasoning was that ending the war quickly by completely destroying the enemy's capacity and will to continue fighting was better than letting it drag on and become a meat grinder, even if that meant bombing civilians and civilian industry. Obviously this didn't work since WWII was both longer and more deadly than WWI but that was the thinking.
The US dropped not just the nuclear bombs on civilians.
> The raids that were conducted by the U.S. military on the night of 9–10 March 1945, codenamed Operation Meetinghouse, are the single most destructive bombing raid in human history.[1] 16 square miles (41 km2; 10,000 acres) of central Tokyo was destroyed, leaving an estimated 100,000 civilians dead and over one million homeless.[1] The atomic bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945, by comparison, resulted in the immediate death of an estimated 70,000 to 150,000 people.
I highly recommend the book 'Flyboys' by James Bradley (also the author of Flags of our Fathers) for help putting this period of WWII into context. A good portion of the end of the book discusses the firebombing of Japan and the dropping of the two nuclear bombs, and how that was rationalized as acceptable in the minds of those who participated.
The final Japanese defense of their home islands would have involved arming every man, woman, and child, for them to act as suicide warriors. "The Glorious Death of the 100 Million" (note the name was an exaggeration of their actual population)
This made the entire population a military target (except for very young children, I guess).
That applies to every country with any kind of universal draft or conscription. For example, that’s more or less the argument that Hamas was making to justify its hostage-taking some months ago.
It's still not 100% clear if the nuclear bombing was necessary to force the Japanese to surrender, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria could have been enough, making the civilian casualties in Hiroshima and Nagasaki pointless victims.
Of what relevance is that question? Was the US supposed to determine that the use was necessary before it was used? How is that even supposed to be determined, especially in wartime when the inner workings of the enemy are opaque?
How is that an argument? In all conflicts the inner working of the enemy are someone opaque, why should this lead to assuming that everyone including women and children is a legit military target?
The observation about the militarization of the entire society is a defense against the charge that dropping the bomb was a war crime, even if the decision makers didn't know it at the time.
I see you think that even presenting legal arguments in defense against war crime charges is "the reasoning of war criminals". I guess you're not big on the idea of legal defense when charged for a crime. A real fan of justice, aren't you. /s
> The observation about the militarization of the entire society is a defense against the charge that dropping the bomb was a war crime,
Except there wasn't such “observation” and we cannot be certain that it would have happened. You are assuming that the Japanese would have fought this way, and you use this assumption to defend the idea that they were all legit targets.
> even if the decision makers didn't know it at the time.
What?
> I see you think that even presenting legal arguments in defense against war crime charges is "the reasoning of war criminals". I guess you're not big on the idea of legal defense when charged for a crime.
Except it's not “a legal argument in defense of war crime charge” at all, to accept it as an argument one must adhere to your vision in the first place, which make it a very weak defense to say the least. Akin to “yes I killed my wife but she was completely crazy and I'm sure I'd have killed me first at some point”, which I'd doubt any lawyer would be happy if you said that in court…
The horrifying thing is that the US knew the Japanese wanted to surrender, and knew that demanding abdication of the emperor was both a major impediment, unnecessary and in fact harmful (because it would reduce the number of outposts that would accept the surrender order). The US had broken the codes used with messages to diplomats in the USSR and other traffic and could clearly see the Japanese situation. Despite this they never waivered from ambiguous "unconditional surrender" terminology... likely so they could continue pressing the front in Korea which would also end with a peace.
So the US could have had peace earlier, with several hundred thousand less deaths, if they had been willing to put in writing specifically what they actually wanted, and what they got in the end.
The viable alternative would have been demanding a surrender but stating that The Emperor will remain as a constitutional monarch - which is what the US ended up imposing anyway because it was the logical way to forestall resistance from a radicalized population. Such a demand would likely have resulted in a surrender before the atomic bombings.
The earliest surrender request wasn't merely just for the emperor to stay in power. Japan also wanted to keep the territories they had acquired and manage all post-war trials of the military in-house.
Any American general or politician that agreed to these terms would have been seen as a fool or a coward, especially after Pearl Harbor, Bataan, Singapore, etc.
We have records of Japanese high rank military wanting to keep fighting after the dropping of the second bomb. They figured out the USA might have a couple more nukes, so Japan should endure them four and keep fighting.
As said in other threads, it was the nukes and the soviets invading what finally forced the surrender.
> The horrifying thing is that the US knew the Japanese wanted to surrender
> So the US could have had peace earlier, with several hundred thousand less deaths, if they had been willing to put in writing specifically what they actually wanted, and what they got in the end.
These points are both highly contested, yet you say them as if they are foregone conclusions.
I enjoy taking a position on things. It is a mentally stimulating to research an ambiguous situation, research it, come to a conclusion, and then unabashedly speak to your beliefs.
One is not obligated to put disclaimers and counter-arguments in every comment, so long as you treat other people's counter-arguments with respect (which for me mostly means resisting the urge to reply to replies). In fact I think HN and discourse in general is at it's best when lots of people put forth different ideas, clearly and specifically articulated.
It took me a long time to come to this style of discourse. If you haven't tried it, I heartily recommend dabbling in simply and directly stating your view.
The atomic bombing of Japan didn't happen today, it happened nearly 80 years ago. Plenty of people consider it a war crime to this day, and plenty of people excuse it, but it's difficult to be horrified by events old enough to barely exist within living memory.
80 years are not so far in time for me as I recently realized that when I was born I was closer to the end of the war than my current age. That made me feel somehow more connected to that past event than to the present.
While the horror of the atomic bombings of civilian centers is more obvious in hindsight, it also overshadows what was at least equally horrific at the time: the continuous and deliberate widespread fire bombings of civilian centers.
Much of what the US did in Japan would be considered a war crime if it happened nowadays. The Pacific campaign also heavily leveraged existing racist sentiments and explicitly dehumanized Asian people which carried over into the Korean War (where the US did manage to commit more war crimes than either of the two Koreas) and the Vietnam War.
This isn't to excuse Japan who to this day refuse to acknowledge the Rape of Nanjing and is orthogonal to the legitimacy of US involvement in the Korean and Vietnamese civil wars (the former of which explicitly contradicted a UN decision and presented a last-ditch effort to avoid an imminent North Korean victory). Japan was the aggressor and did horrible war crimes themselves. But that doesn't mean everything the US did was above the board and it doesn't excuse it. Opinions are still divided on the firebombing of Dresden and even by its most exaggerated retellings it pales in comparison to what happened in Japan.
Also what the article doesn't go out of its way to mention but implies: the atomic bombings were part of what led to the Japanese surrender but did not play the critical part Truman would later claim they did (while continously exaggerating the number of American lives saved by it over the years). The Soviet invasion and risk of annexation played a far greater part and surrendering to the US to stop the Soviet advance was preferable to a Soviet annexation that would have at best meant a guaranteed deposition of the Emperor if not an execution.
The Japanese Emperor was considered divine. Although the surrender ended up being unconditional the US did not hold him personally responsible and allowed him to remain in a ceremonial function. If there were no off-the-record agreements about this, it was at least a leap of faith with the understanding that the alternative was not an American occupation but guaranteed annexation by the Soviets who were known to not look too kindly on kings, gods or the territorial integrity of Japan (given the Russo-Japanese war preceding WW2). The US wasn't keen on risking the lives of its soldiers by invading the deathtrap that was mainland Japan whereas the Soviets had a reputation (accurate or not) of not fearing meatgrinders.
>This isn't to excuse Japan who to this day refuse to acknowledge the Rape of Nanjing
I have often heard that Japan denies or has never apologized for it's actions in China / Korea but there are numerous apologies that have been given. I think this is often repeated to both paint Japanese people as uncaring and also keep divisions between Japanese, Chinese and Korean people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_war_apology_statements...
>On August 15, 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the Surrender of Japan, the Japanese prime minister Tomiichi Murayama gave the first formal apology for Japanese actions during the war.[171]
>He offered his apology to all survivors and to the relatives and friends of the victims. That day, the prime minister and the Japanese Emperor Akihito pronounced statements of mourning at Tokyo's Nippon Budokan. Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanjing, criticized Murayama for not providing the written apology that had been expected. She said that the people of China "don't believe that an... unequivocal and sincere apology has ever been made by Japan to China" and that a written apology from Japan would send a better message to the international community.[172]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre
The allegation isn't that they denied or never apologized for "Japan's actions in China/Korea". The allegation is that they don't acknowledge the Rape of Nanjing (or the crimes of Unit 731).
Imagine Germany had at numerous times apologized for WW2 and "the actions committed" without ever explicitly acknowledging the Holocaust, the mass murders in Poland and other annexed territories and so on.
Without explicitly acknowledging what Japan had done in Nanjing (or what Unit 731 had done as "experiments"), an apology means nothing. It's the difference between apologizing for a war and for the war crimes committed during that war. It implies that everything that happened can simply be paraphrased as "actions during wartime", which understates the extent of the heinousness of the crimes.
> However, Mariana Budjeryn, a Ukrainian scholar at Harvard argued that the denuclearization of Ukraine was not a mistake and that it was unclear whether Ukraine would be better off as a nuclear state. She argued that the deterrent value of the nuclear weapons in Ukraine was questionable. While Ukraine had "administrative control" of the weapons delivery systems, it would have needed 12 to 18 months to establish full operational control, and Ukraine would have faced sanctions from the West and likely retaliation from Russia. Moreover, Ukraine had no nuclear weapons program and would have struggled to replace nuclear weapons once their service life expired. Instead, by agreeing to give up the nuclear weapons, Ukraine received financial compensations and the security assurances of the Budapest Memorandum.[29]
12 months seems like a plenty of time for US/Russia to come and take back the nukes.
> Is it just me, or should we be way more horrified by the fact that the US dropped atomic bombs on civilians?
What was the alternative?
The Japanese leadership knew for a year from their own internal reports that they couldn't win the war, and simply want to grind down US resolve. Imperial Japan wanted the following conditions:
* Emperor stays on throne
* Japan gets to keep territory
* any allegation of (e.g.) war crimes would be dealt with internally by the Japanese themselves
Would it be okay for Nazi Germany to surrender if:
* Hitler and the Nazis got to stay in government
* Germany got to keep Czechoslovakia, Poland, etc
* war crime allegations would be dealt by the Nazis themselves
The first bomb was dropped on August 6. The Japanese War Cabinet held a meeting on August 9 to discuss the situation, and decided not to surrender as they didn't think the US could create more bombs. So even after the first bomb was dropped, they wouldn't surrender.
In the middle of the meeting they learned of the second bomb, which was dropped that morning.
The War Cabinet was split 3-3 on whether to surrender. After the second bomb.
They called in the full cabinet to discuss things. The full cabinet was split. After the second bomb.
They called in the Emperor at that point, and he said to end the war. Though in his announcement that was broadcast over the radio, the word "surrender" was never used:
Seriously: what was the alternative? Invade the main islands (Operation Downfall)? What would have been the US casualties? What would have been the Japanese civilian casualties? Or blockade Japan and starve them?
We only consider the killing of civilians a crime when it's committed by those we define as our enemies.
Replace Hiroshima with a hypothetical New York and ask your question again. Do you see an alternative to nuking of a hypothetical New York to win a war?
There's a very good case to be made that the primary motivation to use the atomic weapons was the fact that they existed ..
developed at very great expense for a European War that no longer existed, Germany having surrended when the weapons were finally complete - with only one test on a tower in a desert the military side wanted a real world 'battlefield' test and there was already an ongoing campaign to destroy each and every major and minor target in Japan (much much cheaper per city) using conventional HE & firebombs.
Well, instead of reading that article, I have already read the book that it references, Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan:
It goes through the timeline of the events, including who knew what, at what point.
Given Japanese intransigence (and their 'counter-demands'), the experiences of Okinawa, etc, I don't see any reasonable alternatives—unless you think a bloodbath of Allied soldiers and Japanese civilians is reasonable:
If Japan was not willing to surrender after one bomb, and barely decided to surrender after two, what makes you think they'd surrender with zero bombs dropped?
Truman's first priority was to the US people. If bombing Japan achieved peace faster, and thus reduced US casualties, why wouldn't he take that option?
Seriously: what is the counter-factual event in what the US/Allies should have done with Japan? Invade? Blockade/starve? Not go for unconditional surrender? Other? What is (was) the alternative?
And I'm aware of the author of the article, Wellerstein, having read his book Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States. He's also the creator of the Nukemap website:
> It references many books, with a number of different viewpoints and arguments.
It references Walker and Alperovitz. I'll be sure to add Alperovitz to my reading list.
> You've read a single book with a single viewpoint.
I said I have read Walker. I have not said I've read only Walker.
> There's a breadth of informed opinion on the matter; the article you haven't read outlines a number of them.
By "number of" do you mean "two": Walker and the "consensus" / "traditional" view, and Alperovitz and the (so-called) "revisionist" view. (Kuznick is mentioned in passing at the very end.)
Walker is well aware of the ambiguity of the situation; from an interview:
> One argument has been made by the scholar Richard Frank, and I find it wonderfully convincing. Richard makes the argument – going back to the atomic bomb versus the Soviet invasion – he says that the bomb was essential to convince Hirohito to surrender. But that it was the Soviet invasion that convinced the generals of all those armies in China and other parts of East Asia to surrender. Because there was genuine concern, both among American officials and Japanese officials, that the emperor’s order to surrender would not be obeyed by generals in East Asia, who had huge armies and who could’ve fought on for a very long time at enormous cost to everybody. Richard makes the argument that once the Soviets came in, then the generals out in the field, who were outraged by the idea of surrendering, knew they couldn’t defeat the Soviets. So they went along with it. It’s a very interesting argument that I think makes a very sensible separation of what the impact of the bomb was and the impact of the Soviet invasion.
> Walker: […] Those are the positions. And as I, and a lot of others, argue – I’m certainly not alone – they’re both seriously flawed. The traditional view because Truman did not face a stark choice between the bomb and an invasion. The invasion was not going to begin until on or around November 1, and a lot of could’ve happened between August and November of 1945. Also the view that if an invasion had been necessary, it would’ve cost hundreds of thousands of lives: there’s simply no contemporaneous evidence that supports that argument. It was made after the war as a means to justify the use of the bomb against a really small number of critics, who in the late ‘40s, early ‘50s, were saying that perhaps the bomb wasn’t necessary. It’s also beyond question that the invasion was not inevitable. I mean, the idea that Truman had to use the bomb because if he didn’t the only other option was an invasion is simply wrong. So, the traditional view in its pure form, that Truman used the bomb to avoid an invasion, simply doesn’t hold up.
> Kelly: In the view of the revisionists.
> Walker: No, in the view of those of us who are somewhere in between. What I argue is that Truman used the bomb for the reasons he said he did, to end the war as quickly as possible. No one in a position of authority or knowledge, and certainly not his chief and military advisors, told him in the summer of 1945 that if you don’t use the bomb, an invasion is inevitable and it’s going to cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Estimates for lives lost that were projected by military experts in the summer of 1945 were far less than that, and the numbers are far from hard evidence. But there’s no evidence whatsoever that he was ever told that hundreds of thousands of lives would be the cost of an invasion of Japan. That was something that came about later.
> My argument is that Truman didn’t have to be told that an invasion would cost hundreds of thousands of lives. He knew it was going to cost a lot of lives, tens of thousands, if an invasion was necessary. He also knew that even without an invasion, the war was still going on. Okinawa had been defeated in late June of 1945, so we had one month when there weren’t any major battlefronts between the end of the Battle of Okinawa and the end of the war, which is July 1945.
> In that month, about 775 American soldiers and Marines were killed in combat. About another 2,300 or 2,400 died from other causes, disease, wounds, accidents, whatever. So, you had 3,000 soldiers and Marines who were killed in the month of July of 1945 without any major battlefronts.
> You also had sailors being killed. The sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis occurred July 28 [misspoke: July 30], 1945, just a horrific event, in which a Japanese submarine attacked and sank the U.S.S. Indianapolis. Of the 1100 [misspoke: 1200] crewmembers, 880 died, either from the explosion of the ship or were stranded in water for a very long time and either died from exposure or from sharks. Just a horrific story.
> As long as the war was going on, that was going to happen, and that’s what Truman and his advisors were concerned about. No one had to tell them that the alternative to using the bomb was saving far fewer lives. That number of 3,200 or 3,300 who died in July, that’s just soldiers and Marines, so you have sailors on top of that. That was plenty of reason to use the bomb if it had a chance to end the war as quickly as possible.
I think when the atomic bombs were dropped Japan basically didnt have any means of defense. I think nuking a country that is defenseless is probably evil even if in their hearts they are unwilling to accept unconditional surrender (this last point is even in contention).
The Japanese took 'too long' to surrender, so by the time they contacted the US government on August 14th, because of communication delays the sorties had already gone out early August 15th and dropped their payloads:
> About a week after V-J Day, I was one of a small group of scientists and engineers interrogating an intelligent, well-informed Japanese Army officer in Yokohama. We asked him what, in his opinion, would have been the next major move if the war had continued. He replied: "You would probably have tried to invade our homeland with a landing operation on Kyushu about November 1. I think the attack would have been made on such and such beaches."
> "Could you have repelled this landing?" we asked, and he answered: "It would have been a very desperate fight, but I do not think we could have stopped you."
> "What would have happened then?" we asked.
> He replied: "We would have kept on fighting until all Japanese were killed, but we would not have been defeated," by which he meant that they would not have been disgraced by surrender.
> "At this stage of the war, the lack of modern weaponry and ammunition meant that most were armed with swords or even bamboo spears."
So basically defenseless. I understand that your opinion is that at the time they did not think of themselves as defenseless but this actually doesnt matter to me in the moral claims. The fact is that they were defenseless and we nuked them twice. We nuke them because we wanted to test these weapons and AFAIK the USA kept these cities from bombing raids in order to test the effectiveness of the weapons.
Also the Japanese being 'too long' to surrender because they were not a well organized fighting force by that time. I think it was days before they even understood what happened in Hiroshima.
and to address your edit:
The irony is that we actually gave them what they wanted. The wanted to keep the emperor and we caved.
> Is it just me, or should we be way more horrified by the fact that the US dropped atomic bombs on civilians?
First Japan was allied with nazi Germany. And nazi Germany was putting jews, handicapped people, romanians, gays, etc. into crematoriums, alive. These weren't soldiers either.
Second Japan did the Pearl Harbor attack: up until then the US was still a neutral country in WWII.
There were many ways to not get at war in the US. Those two weren't among them. What was the US supposed to do? Not drop the bomb and let Russia annihilate and conquer Japan?
These two atomic bombs were horrible but during WWII the US pretty much single handedly saved (most of) the world from both nazism and stalinism.
I'm not saying the US have always been acting in good faith lately but during WWII I'm not sure the US can be faulted much.
Put it another way: a world war vs fucking evil incarnate is messy.
Not a lot of nuance in your view of the U.S. role in WWII.
For example, your point:
> Japan did the Pearl Harbor attack: up until then the US was still a neutral country in WWII.
The U.S. Export Control Act (July 1940), freezing of Japanese assets (July 1941) and then the oil embargo (August 1941) are examples of some of the nuance I see.
The US did those things in response to Imperial Japan's invasion, occupation, and looting of other Asian nations. No nuance is needed; Japan was the aggressor pure and simple.
Nobody would ever defend the Nazis as victims yet people come out of the woodwork to defend Imperial Japan, their brutal attempt at colonialism, and the equivalent holocaust they committed. As I've said before, the Japanese sure got good marketing after the war.
Who's defending Imperial Japan? Nuance just means recognizing that actors on both sides were participants in the build up. I dislike the wholesale excusing of one sides actions because the other side was worse.
Given that Imperial Japan was so awful I'm wondering how far you would allow the U.S. to go? How about if the U.S. rounded up all Japanese Americans and put them in camps? Also completely okay, I guess, because Imperial Japan.
No country is blameless in war and the United States is no exception, but there is no reasonable comparison between the evil Japan committed in Asia and what the United States did to Japanese Americans.
When you repeat the justification that the Japanese government used for going to war with the US more or less verbatim without explaining the background, well, that would be you, sir.
> "I dislike the wholesale excusing of one sides actions because the other side was worse."
That's not a moral or principled stance. That's just whataboutism.
> "Given that Imperial Japan was so awful I'm wondering how far you would allow the U.S. to go?"
You seem to be looking for an answer to paint me in a bad light and I'm feeling magnanimous today so I'll oblige you: like most Asians other than the Japanese, I see no moral problem with either the atomic bombings or the firebombings of Japanese cities in WW2.
I am white but I have been told by my (Taiwanese) manager that, "All Asian's hate the Japanese." I know only a little of the history of Japan and its neighbors but he assured me there is a long history of Japan being the aggressor behind this sentiment.
I don't feel like I'm trying to paint you in a bad light, rather hoping you'll concede that one side doesn't get a free pass if the other does something atrocious.
Perhaps it was my having been raised a Quaker during a formative period of my life, but an eye for an eye is quite the opposite of my philosophy.
